Drowsey rantings from the back seat.

On my way to Turkey for a base run. I’m really glad my battery is lasting for the time being. It’s a six hour drive up there. I can’t wait to get a cheese burger. I know it’s only been a month and a half since I waved farewell to my beloved homeland, but nothing makes you miss home more than knowing you’re eight thousand miles away from the nearest In N Out. I wonder how well a Double Double keeps… *stares thoughtfully into the distance*

To pack for my journey I decided to use my brand spanking new Swiss Army backpack which boasts sufficient space for my 17” behemoth of a laptop, I got hustled by Amazon.com, again, though not entirely an impulse purchase, as I’ve been in the market for just such a satchel for some time now. Much to my surprise, the dedicated compartment for my electronic companion is clearly only large enough for a 15” computer. I can however squeeze it in, though just not where it’s intended to go. I’m torn between leaving it the way it is and trying to send it back for the right model. I did purchase the bag specifically for its 17” design, but I do plan on one day getting a smaller laptop. We’ll see how this trip goes. If I can live with it the way it is, I’ll just leave it be.

Beware the wrath of a disgruntled former lover. Nothing you can say will be enough. Nothing you could possibly do, short of offering barred jugular for evisceration, could serve to satiate the blood lust. There isn’t any way you could ever understand. There isn’t an ice cubes chance in hell that you could even fathom the pain that you’ve inflicted with your cavalier approach to the relationship. Never mind the facts. Never mind that you gladly went out of your way to make them happy. Never mind that you think she has an amazing body. Please forget that the sex was great and not just about the physical connection. And oh by the way, sir, whilst you are forgetting, purge from your mind that you ever considered a future with such a far superior individual. You are not worthy.

I’m having a pretty good time out here in Damascus. It really isn’t anything that I thought it would be. I was expecting great expanses of nothing but sand. Not that Syria is in short supply, but there is far more vegetation than I thought there would be and it’s actually quite mountainous. I especially like the last part. After living in Riga, which I’m convinced is one of the flattest places on Earth, I’d really begun to miss the jagged landscape silhouetted in the morning sun. The city proper is chaotically impressive. I could do without much of the traffic, but I don’t drive, so It’s not one my main concerns. There are fountains everywhere. It seems that they are a display of power. As if they are defying the desert. I don’t know how big a feat it is exactly, but they too are impressive. The old city is everything I expected it to be. It’s packed full of little shops. Some of which I could literally touch the back wall of by just leaning in from the outside and reaching over. The effect is actually quite deceptive. You’ll walk past a series of miniature shops and speckled here and there are decent sized walk-in stores. Then you’ll go a bit further and an ornately inlaid set of double doors will open to a hidden courtyard restaurant that is kept secret by these sell anything closet stores. Contrary to my preconceptions, they have most modern services, though the internet sucks, you just need to know where to go. And it’s delightfully cheap. You can go out three nights in a row on 20 bucks. It’s not short on its oddities though. Some of the customs and norms still throw me off, but being away from home for 5 years bouncing from country to country gets you used to such things. I have to say that the best part is the diversity. There are lots of students and ex-pats from all over the world and the Syrian people are very welcoming. I don’t miss California any less, but my stay here is turning out to be more comfortable than I had expected.

Yahoo! sucks

Damn it YAHOO! What the hell are you thinking? Here again you’ve taken a simple service and perverted it. All I want if my fucking email. I don’t want you to track my search history and suggest custom advertisements. I don’t want you to give me the weather for every location that I’ve logged in from in the last 12 months. I don’t want an up to the micro-second status report on the people in my address book that I haven’t talked to since I joined the Marines. Why can’t you leave well enough alone? About 6 months ago, Yahoo changed the interface of it’s email portal yet again. Adding dozens of new features that nobody uses and rearranging everything. I’ve gotten used to it though. I’ve been using the same email address for going on 11 years. Like clockwork, as soon as I figure out the new spread, they go and change it up. This latest rendition though has got to be the worst. It’s almost gotten as annoying as those fucking Facebook quizzes. The new and improved spam blocker still lets through the porn, the penis enlargement ads, and all the Nigerian scams that it used to. The picture previewer is still ass achingly slow, and the size of the emails you can send hasn’t gotten any larger. Sure you now have enough room to keep all the lolcats and propaganda, but you still have to send the files one at a time. I’m out! Gmail, here I come. If you need to reach me, shoot your traffic over to aaronpleas@gmail.com. Better spam protection, virus software, and better yet, it’s brand new and I won’t plaguing everyone with whatever zombie emails I may be sending out. The interface is better, simpler really. If you want to write a novel, get some publishing software. If you want to keep up with your social networking, get on Facebook. If you want to send an email and just an email, Yahoo is no longer the answer. Besides, sooner or later, Google will own stock on everyone’s soul anyway so you may as well make it as smooth a transition as possible. Jokes aside, it’s a better service. You can tell that they took the complaints and mistakes and really focused on making a superior base as an email service provider. Rejoice! Email is simple again. Though I must say in advance, if you start sending me forwarded emails, you will receive some serious hate mail.

My Monster!

I figure a good way to dust off the old blog would be to introduce the newest member of the collection of electronic devices that one could easily mistake for a family member if you only heard of how excited I get when I talk about them.

Everyone, please meet (no, I don't seriously name my gadgets)

Lian Li PC-A70 Tower
EVGA Micro ATX Motherboard
Saphire Vapor X
Corsair 1000W Power Supply
Intel i7 2.66GHz CPU
Kingston 64Gb SSD
Seagate 7200 rpm 1.5Gb HD (x2)
OCZ 2Gb ddr2 1600 (x6)
LG Blu-ray RW

So here she is, I demand that anything that takes up this much time/money in my life be referred to as female. The build is going smoothly enough seeing as I've never done one. I'm going to be running Windows 7 straight off of the SSD. I literally salivate over how fast this thing should load up. I also purchased a fan/heat sink combo to replace the stock one that came with the CPU. However, for the life of me I couldn't figure out how to put the damn thing on. I spent about 30 minutes mounting the AMD bracket to the heat sink. The holes for the screws were just ever so slightly smaller than the screws themselves. I eventually, through a great deal of effort and some minor perspiration, managed to attach one to the other only to find that there wasn't any conceivable way to mount the fan to the processor. Hopefully I can get the AMD bracket off. Because, as you may have noticed, I don't have a AMD processor/motherboard. *Epic Facepalm* I guess I shouldn't just tear into my new toys and start putting them together next time. In any case, I bought all these things to do it myself to learn and to be able to upgrade parts later, so I'm fine with what I'm working with. I'm taking pictures throughout the build so maybe I'll have those up on here sooner or later. I'm off tomorrow and am already excited to get back to putting it together.

*Update*

After eight hours of anticipation I finally got off work and came back home to take another crack at finishing my build. After realizing that I had put the wrong mounting bracket on the heat sink, I decided to give that another try. I got the AMD one off and managed to put the correct one on without too much hassle. But it's on there now, I don't think it's going anywhere for a while. I had a couple of minor issues along the way. I still can't figure out how to hook up my 3-pin power indicator to the 2-pin spot for it, I don't seem to have enough SATA cables for all three of my hard drives, I don't have a corded mouse to use when I start up Windows, my motherboard manual says I have 6 fan ports and I clearly have only 4, and there is the fact that I can't turn it on... I don't know what the issue is. I have power according to this little blue light next to the 24-pin plug in and the 8-pin is also in. I also have reason to believe that there is power because the fans turn over for about a rotation before stopping. But other than that, there is no indication that the thing is getting juice or doing what it's supposed to be doing. I can't get to the BIOS, which I was kinda excited about because I've never messed with it, and my monitor (AWESOME) isn't getting a signal from the computer of any kind. I've got out resident techno geek coming over some time this week to have a crack at it, hopefully he can shed some light on the issue.